Imagine if we flipped on the television tomorrow morning to learn that either Washington, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago or Dallas had been wiped off the map by a WMD. Such an event would only be second in worldwide significance to, say, contact with space aliens.

This is the truth: Millions of Americans could be killed by a terrorist attack, most likely committed in the name of Islam. The technology is out there. We just don't want to think about it. We've said it before, ignoring potential horror is human nature.

The most outspoken among us (and by that I mean psychopathic) argue that it would be best to round up the Muslims in our midst and lock them up in internment camps. Following this thinking, why not simply revoke any citizenship or residency rights they have and deport them all? And wouldn't the logical extension of this defense strategy be also to deprive them of life, in addition to liberty and property? After all, people we forcibly expel would tend to plot against America so we would certainly want them dead. Given the outrage that the prophylactic murder of Muslims would provoke in the Arab world, global genocide of this population couldn't be far behind, right?

Not if we really wanted to be "safe."

Nice and tidy, ain't it? If this line of thinking makes sense to you, then you are no longer interested in defending America. You are interested in defending some other place that would remain where America once stood, after she had sacrificed herself on the altar of simplistic barbarism.

I'm also guessing that if this logic resonates with you, you've never had any kind of significant contact with a Muslim. Because if you had that would change your entire viewpoint... What's that? Oh... right. Who am I kidding? Plenty of Germans who sent Jews off to the camps in World War II had enjoyed friendships with those they condemned to death. And we saw this kind of insanity again during the Serbo-Croatian conflict, in which people of the former Yugoslavia killed, raped and tortured people who had literally been their next-door-neighbors for twenty years.... So three cheers for humanity. Nice job, God. Thanks for the free will. You really shouldn't have.

Okay, all bullshit aside, let's game out what would really happen if we got nuked... when expressions of human compassion would be drowned out by feral cries for the blood of our enemies.

First of all, the extreme anti-Muslim logic elucidated above would instantaneously enter the mainstream. Blameless Muslims would be killed in our streets by the thousands. Martial law would certainly be declared, but would not necessarily impede the bloodletting.

Our government would show a similar lack of restraint in responding militarily. The President would view an attack on such a scale as providing carte blanche to attack every nation that had exhibited hostility toward the U.S. since the advent of the war on terror.

I suppose the only question would be how many seconds of Arabs dancing in the streets would Al Jazeera be able to broadcast before America obliterated Damascus, Teheran, Palestine, the Sunni Triangle, Ali's House of Falafel--and most every other place in the world which could be remotely considered guilty by association. If Al Qaeda were to hit two or more of our cities I'm guessing we would also pulverize Mecca, just out of spite...

And let's not forget our friends in Pyongyang, who would repeatedly take missiles in the keister until everything north of the DMZ looked like a glow-in-the-dark parking lot.
We can have little doubt but that the Chinese would threaten full-scale war were we to attack North Korea or any number of other countries. Russia would likely offer similar warnings. Significantly, both Russia and China have already opposed sanctions against Iran for its ongoing uranium enrichment. While our global rivals have played it cool during our Iraq adventure, our imminent use of earth-penetrating missiles against Iran's underground nuclear facilities could still trigger a world war. At a minimum, it will incite the Iranian government and others to redouble their efforts to massacre us--and not just by funding the occasional homicide bombing in some Baghdad street market. We're talking soldiers, tanks and jets, with all the trimmings. If nationalism takes hold of the people of Iran, as we should fully expect it would, don't expect that country to fold like a cheap suit. Iraq has been a walk in the park compared to any future conflict with Iran.

Remember the 50,000 body bags we shipped to Iraq in anticipation of heavy casualties? Don't send them back just yet. If the Iranians wanted to retaliate against us militarily they might actually march on us in the Middle East. The interesting question would be who the local Shiite population would side with.

We can only hope that the President has met extensively with the Chinese and the Russians to discuss possible scenarios in the event America is attacked. We must ensure that the three major nuclear powers are all singing from the same page in the hymnal, regardless of who is saying what publicly. I am as serious as erectile dysfunction -- this is absolutely critical.

In fact, instead of clearing brush in Crawford he should get on a plane at least monthly and sit in a room with Putin ("Pootie") and Chinese President Hu Jintao ("Hootie"?) and just shoot the shit about this. While Pootie and Hootie are at it maybe they could get some assurances that the U.S. won't automatically melt the whole of the Middle East just because some asshole hits the terror jackpot.

This tension with radical Islam threatens our species just as surely as the Cold War did, if not more so. At least the former Soviets wanted to live another day to enjoy their Vodka and watch the Olympics and so on. These Al Qaeda motherfuckers is crazy.

As always, nobody likes to think of the unthinkable. But we'd better get on this before a lot more people lose their lives and the rest of us lose our humanity.